Tackling Debt, pt 1

Last week I wrote about Fundamental vs Significant, but only gave a single, simplified example of how that distinction can clarify a complex information landscape. Let’s examine this more deeply with a peek into our everyday lives to a place where you likely have your own experiences of complex prioritization – Debt Management. If you aren’t curious enough about this particular distinction or debt management in general then this is a good point to get off this bus. :)

First, a quick recap of Fundamental vs Significant. This distinction is often helpful to bring to bear when you have a list of multiple things or goals that are “important.” The Fundamental items are important in that they are the building blocks, the non-negotiable, the first things first items. These are “important” because without them taken care of we can’t really do anything else. The Significant items are the end goals, the desired outcomes, or things that answer the “why” questions. These are often the whole point of orienting towards the list in the first place.

Approaches to Debt Management is a great place to tease these out a bit more. Most people have a variety of debt strung out over multiple accounts. Between home, auto, student loans, and credit cards, the average American is almost $97,000 in debt according to 2022 statistics. That’s a lot of money! The goal of managing this debt is a great place to explore the priority landscape and various ways to approach it, especially because it combines the rational and emotional aspects of ourselves in very powerful ways.

 A common refrain I hear from my clients that are struggling with Debt Management is that it all just feels overwhelming, regardless of their overall financial status. They are lost in the swirl of minimum payments, interest rates, and due dates. Compounding this confusing monthly carousel of changing numbers is their own fluctuating emotional relationship to it all leading to disjointed and ultimately ineffective attempts to address it. Their long running goal of “getting on the other side of money” remains elusive, and further recedes over the horizon with each new billing cycle. “I want to get off this terrible monthly ride but I don’t even know where to start.” So they keep all their debt on minimum payment autopay (much to the banks’ delight, FYI) and just keep pushing it off to “later.”

 But one day they finally decide “later” has arrived. They are ready to begin tackling their larger debt challenges head on, but where to start? What’s the path forward to change their relationship to debt? Not necessarily getting out of debt entirely, but at least getting it under control and to a place where they feel good about it. More importantly, getting to a place where they feel good about themselves in their relationship with money.

 Managing a complex priority landscapes like Debt Management a perfect place to illustrate the value of the Fundamental vs Significant filtering lens. Both as a first step, and also at many other steps further into the process. Done well, applying this lens can greatly clarify the terrain. From this perspective of increased clarity the priorities can almost organize themselves into a coherent framework producing clear action plans for their realization.

 We’ll begin by first trying to identify the specific Significant goal that really resonates with the motivational engine of determination, a goal that runs on emotion aligned with intention. On the surface the initial emotions that come up in conversations with my clients usually hit the same deep and powerful chords. “I’m tired of being afraid” or “I’m letting down my family” or “I’m simply ashamed I let things get this bad.” Underneath the surface we can see the common theme of “I keep failing at this and it feels really bad.” From here the Significant emotional goal we want to orient towards becomes apparent – “I am succeeding at this and it feels really good.” With this Significant emotionally grounded priority in hand we now turn our attention over to identifying the Fundamental specifics in play.

 Obviously, the main Fundamental need is “extra money to be applied to debt,” but if this was already present then we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. So now the Fundamental ingredient for achieving our Significance goal of feeling good while succeeding in debt management shifts over to finding “extra money to be applied to debt.”

 Finding “extra money” resonates with my previous piece on finding extra time. Neither time nor money randomly accumulate throughout the day in ways where we can simply grab them and put them to use. Like time, “extra money” must be made. Either by doing extra work, like taking on a side hustle, or by finding places in your current spending where you can shift things around to free up money being spent elsewhere. If taking on a side hustle seems appealing, then stop reading and get busy doing it! But if you suspect that the “extra money” is already present but you are spending it elsewhere then it’s time to investigate your purchasing patterns.

 Step 1 in this investigation is to build out some spreadsheets and simply track where you’ve been spending your money. Ideally you can start by going back 3 or 4 months to build out the basic patterns by pulling your various transaction records. There are plenty of budget tracking tools out there to help you here but the key Fundamental categories of expenses are Fixed, Variable, and Discretionary. Fixed costs include mortgage/rent, car payment, insurance, and anything else that is the same each month and can’t easily be cancelled without radically impacting your life. Variable usually includes utilities, gasoline, groceries, and other necessities that change each month and that you are able to influence somewhat through choice and behavior. Discretionary is pretty much everything else where you have a much bigger role to play in your daily decision making. A quick note, many of your discretionary choices might show up as “fixed” in that they autopay for the same amount each month, but these are discretionary in that cancelling the payment is optional with minimal life impact. Contrary to public opinion, Netflix is indeed a discretionary cost.

 And as a reminder, this is just an observation phase, not an operational phase. If you find yourself really inspired to begin changing your spending habits now or at any point along the way, then great! Go for it! But the point here is just to bring your spending fully into awareness. No more, no less.

 Once spending patterns have been more fully brought to light, we can begin to move into Step 2 of building a monthly budget. But before going there I want to point out that almost all of my clients are somewhat amazed at how unaware they were around certain aspects of their spending. Common blind spots are monthly services no longer used and underestimating how much money they spent on entertainment like food and drink oriented socializing. For many clients this new found clarity around their spending easily illuminates the areas that they want to focus on changing.

 As stated earlier, the larger goal in creating a monthly budget is to provide a specific amount of “extra money” that we can put towards debt management. Now that we are past Step 1, it’s time to check in to see what other Significance goals have come up. Identifying them now will make it easier to flex our spending later to create that money. As I mentioned above, often this is fairly easy and revealed through blind spot exposure. “I had no idea that my random lunches out with coworkers added up to almost $1000 at the end of the month! Ugh, I don’t even like most of those people, I’m changing that right away!” Other times it can be trickier. “I had no idea that my random lunches out with coworkers added up to almost $1000 at the end of the month! Those lunches are fun and make collaborating with those folks at work much easier, I don’t want to have to give those up!” Though different, in each case a Significance goal was pretty clearly revealed.

 But again, the key is to bring intention to bear on what the awareness from Step 1 has provided. Looking through the bigger spending patterns can be revealing here. Putting the Fixed costs aside, both the Variable and Discretionary costs are fair game for analysis. Where do you see places to make changes that don’t immediately feel like a contraction? Where do you see opportunities to “own your choices” more fully and treat this as a game to be won? What are the Fundamentals and how can they be changed?

 From here fully move in to Step 2 and build out a budget based on goals for spending with upper limits in mind to help guide and shape our decision making throughout the next month. For example, if you decided to cut your lunch with coworkers’ costs down from $1000/mo to $500/month then you would obviously need to make different decisions than you had previously. Maybe you bring lunch with you, maybe you opt for Chipotle instead of Capital Grille, but the point is that you are planning behavior changes to align with desired outcome changes. Combining the math from the spreadsheet with clear planned behavior changes is the goal here. A rough hope to “do better next month” just isn’t going to cut it.

 Once you have this budget guide in place and have planned out the behavior changes needed to support it then it’s time to test it out in the real world through experimentation. In other words, you are testing out the alignment between the Fundamental and Significant. The goal here is to build sustainable change, the kind that feels good in the moment and yields results over time. These new behavior patterns may need to be tweaked from time to time, or revised as more latent Significance goals emerged and previous ones subsided. After 2 or 3 months of real world experimentation and observation your realistic monthly budget goals should be greatly clarified.

**FYI, this is a simplified and idealized walk through. In the real world this process is often muddy and confusing, especially when there are multiple Significant goals involved that are all competing to be met. Making this process even trickier is that there are often other Siginifcant goals in play but remain unacknowledged or unconscious. That’s why Debt Management is such a tough nut to crack for so many people!**

 In some sense, Step 3 is the easiest one to make. How much money have you “found” by living according to a budget that guides a lifestyle that you feel good about yet still leaves you with money in your pocket at the end of each month. More importantly, is it enough to move to Step 4 where you start to actively tackle your debt? There is no set number that “works” here, but somewhere near 10% of your total income is a common goal I see. But more important than actual dollars are your deeper feelings. The real question is does this dollar amount support our starting Significance goal of “succeeding at this and feeling really good about it.” You are unlikely to connect to that goal with $25/mo of “extra money,” but $500 is really going to make an impact.

 If you are happy with where you are after Step 3, then come back next week for a detailed walk through of Fundamental vs Significant in Step 4 where we break down the total debt profile and sketch out a path through it. If you don’t like where you are here, then circle back to Step 1 and start a 2nd run through. And I very intentionally didn’t say “start over.” Iteration is the name of the game, and there are always opportunities to improve the processes we are living by. You might just be surprised at how much easier this all is the 2nd time through it.

Fundamental vs Significant

Where do you start when attempting to make significant changes in your life? Or when facing the maelstrom of our VUCA world with pending decisions that need to be made, how do you identify the most important factors that need to be considered? Or once you’ve identified multiple important factors, how do you further prioritize among them? This points to the real question underneath it all – what do I need to be doing today to achieve the desired outcomes of tomorrow?

 Your resources of time, money, and energy are limited. But your list of important priorities is long. Figuring out where to start is a crucial decision, one that shouldn’t just be blindly guessed. Many arguments, both internally within our minds and externally in discussion with others, get bogged down when arguing matters of importance. The confusion and disagreement persist and increase when we are pushed to rate things in order of importance, especially when it comes to allocating limited resources and the choices seem binary. I’d suggest beginning with a further examination of the word important to separate out the Fundamental from the Significant.

 By Fundamental I am referring to the basic building blocks of a situation, the first principles or otherwise necessary components that support everything else. Atoms are fundamental to chemistry. Playing cards are fundamental to poker. These are the key ingredients, and without them you don’t get anywhere. Remove the fundamentals and everything built above them disappears. They are usually fairly concrete, rational, and non-negotiable. Clearly, they are important,but identifying them is only half the battle when we want to “build the new.”

 Significant, in direct contrast, is usually viewed in terms of goals or outcomes and often phrased as the entire point of the plan. Significance often shows up in priority lists as what we decide to achieve and towards which other resources are marshalled. Significance is often emotionally driven, extremely variable, and subject to change and modification. Significance is the “now what?” that decides whether a block of marble will be carved into a sculpture or be sliced into countertops. The Significance is obviously important too, but in an entirely different way. We need to be equally clear on this factor as we are the Fundamentals in order to proceed in our change aspirations.

 Important often hides or confuses these two things. For example, imagine you’re running a strategy meeting to discuss your small business’ budget for next year. One faction is pushing hard to invest in some cost saving measures in production, arguing that cost control is the most important factor in profitability. Another faction is pushing for investing more in improving the product’s features, arguing that customer experience is the most important factor in profitability. Both factions have accurately stated the importance of their idea’s impact on profitability, but have gotten mired in the swamp of relative importance.

 Fortunately, you can see the bigger picture and chime in. “Hey folks. Both teams are right. We can’t be profitable if our costs get out of control and we can’t be profitable if our customer isn’t happy. The costs are Fundamental. Bad cost management will kill us regardless of how happy the customer may be. And happy customers are Significant in that keeping our costs inline won’t mean anything if we don’t have happy customers once the product gets to market. Let’s get out of this false polarity of arguing either/or and team up to find both/and solutions that address the Fundamental cost concerns and Significant customer experience concerns.

 Parsing out these Fundamentals from the Significant in the beginning provides more clarity on your situation and choices in front of you, an important first step. Clarity refines the conversation which helps get your Significant intentions in alignment with the Fundamental facts in play. Getting them to work together harmoniously is what’s truly important.

It’s a VUCA world, you’re just living in it.

“It’s crazy out there!” tops the list as the most common sentiment I’ve been hearing from my clients for the last few years. Now I am adding “It’s crazy IN HERE!” to that list, as even our inner circles of colleagues, friends, and family are shaking up more and more.

 Like WEIRD from a few weeks back, VUCA is another great acronym that helps us make more sense out of an increasingly incoherent world. Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous have grown in measure and impact, supplanting stability, certainty, simplicity, and clarity. This VUCA situation shows no sign of subsiding, and shows every sign of further escalation in the glow of increasing heat coming from the Culture Wars, increasing risk from the emerging meta-crisis, and increasing mental fatigue from our overloaded sensemaking capacities.

 The VUCA world impacts every area of our decision making. Where are you going to place your next investment? How long do you expect to stay in your current job? Your current house? Your current relationship? How much control do you think you have over these things, and do you feel that you are gaining or losing your grip on it? More importantly, what can you do as an Agent to be more resilient in the face of increasing Arena challenges?

 Ideally this concept of VUCA has helped you at least get a better grasp on the status of the big picture and offered you a way to see all the turmoil you face in a more coherent light. But beyond just the seeing the bigger picture more clearly, a closer look at each of the 4 characteristics reveals an embedded action step for addressing it.

 Volatility often shows up most clearly in markets and price fluctuations. Prepare for future volatility by investing in resilience measures. These will be more expensive on the front end of course, but provide immediate benefits in peace of mind and potential longer term benefits by offering some protection or reduced impact from market forces.

 Uncertainty can be reduced by putting effort into getting more information. But let’s click down and specify that its not just about increasing the quantity of information you are digesting. Increasing the quality of the information you are getting is much more important. Finding better information will help you see the details of your specific situation more clearly which ideally leads to better decision which yields better results. Collectively this adds up to better predictive power, automatically decreasing your sense of uncertainty and increasing your sense of control.

 Complexity is perhaps the hardest thing to impact, primarily due to its inherent resistance to all attempts at simplification. One direction to explore that can offer both short and long term benefits in your simplification effort is to seek out specialist help. Consulting an outside expert who can quickly and efficiently give you a streamlined take on a complex situation is a great investment. Finding one who can present that take in ways that are tailored to your situation and provide a path forward is priceless. Another, much harder, direction is to invest in your own capacity. Specialized classes or coaching can be good places to look for doing so.

 Ambiguity is can be the most paralyzing of the 4 characteristics. Not getting a clear read on things leads to hesitation, and as we saw in our OODA Loop piece, hesitation automatically puts you behind the competition. One way to find more clarity in an ambiguous environment is to float some trial balloons out there to see which way the wind might be blowing. Experiment. Run A/B trials. Look for ways to test your intuitions and analyses, and be prepared to quickly revise them. The world is always moving, and good testing will show you paths for keeping up with it. Great testing will show you the ones that get you ahead.

It’s a VUCA world, you’re just living in it. Where can you apply some effort today to be in a better place on it tomorrow?

Forms vs Stance

“Is this the right way?” “Where does my left foot go?” “Now what?” These are the kinds of questions that come up every day across the entire landscape of sports, dance, martial arts, and pretty much any movement-based activity. The heart of many of these disciplines is “formal training,” with a constant focus on learning the proper forms.

 Having spent a lot of time in various sports and martial arts training, I appreciate this emphasis on how to move one’s body in optimal ways to achieve specific goals. If you want to hit a golf ball straight (-ish), then you need to move the club a certain way, and moving the club this certain way requires that you move your body in a certain way. Hence, practicing the form of a “proper swing” is a key part of learning how to hit a golf ball straight (-ish).

 The concept of “formal training” exists across many other domains as well. From cooking and music to medicine and law, “formal training” is a basic requirement for almost anything that you can pursue as a career. Any kind of skill learning requires the intentional engagement of testing your ability against reality, or your mental map against the physical territory. However, there is another, deeper context that is both the background from which the forms arise as well as the ether they must dissolve into for true mastery to emerge.

 When I started taking Krav Maga classes back in Philly I found that my instructor, Kevin, kept repeating the same lessons and going over the same techniques, week in and week out. This really began to bother me. I wanted to learn new stuff every time I walked in. Where are the fancy kicks? The cool combos?

 After a several weeks of this repetition, Kevin surprisingly called the small group of us newer students to come up to the front of the class and stand in a row in front of him. He then asked us to demonstrate some of the forms we had been practicing, unfortunately starting with me. I had been showing up to class diligently and paying attention, so I confidently started to do a basic block/punch move when Kevin suddenly reached down, grabbed my foot, and pulled it straight up, causing me to topple over in a flailing puddle. “Next!” was all I heard as I gathered my wits and started to get back up. He then went down the line, one by one, tripping, pushing, pulling, and otherwise gently taking out all of us newbies. When he was finished, we all stood there silently humbled.

 “What did you learn?”, he loudly asked. Nobody said anything.

 “You’ve all been practicing your forms, right? So how come I was able to take you all down so easily?” Again, silence.

 “None of you were thinking about your stance! Forms are nothing without a good stance, one that is balanced, stable, ready. Stance is the most fundamental part of this practice. Each of you were off balance in different ways, I just simply showed you where.” He paused, and then slowly walked back to my end of the row.

 “Let’s try this again, but this time I want you to pay much more attention to your stance and much less to your forms. Get balanced, stable, ready.”

 He looked at me briefly, and then quickly reached down for my ankle again. This time I was able to avoid his grasp, and his other attempts to push me over. I even performed a few decent moves in between using the forms I had been learning. Same with the rest of the gang as he went down the line.

 “See?” Kevin asked. “Your forms are fine, because you have been practicing them. But they all depend on proper stance. This is what we will be focusing on tonight and the rest of the week.”

 Kevin taught me a valuable lesson that night when it comes to remembering that stance is the root of all forms, and that different forms flow much easier from different stances. A left jab is best performed from one stance, while a sweeping leg kick flows more easily from another. Looking at other sports, it’s easy to see this dynamic at play there too. The “ready position” is the proper stance for playing short stop in baseball, but there is another stance that one takes when batting at the plate. Similar “stance” differentials become apparent when gazing out across the other domains when examining the basis of their forms, like how to properly hold different knives when prepping food or where to place your hand and chin when playing violin vs cello.

 Technical forms in action are, by definition, focused, methodical, and repetitive. They are each designed to accomplish very specific things. A stance, on the other hand, is not. It is loose, adaptive, and pure potential, designed to maximize the range of creative responses to what could happen.

Next time you are struggling with learning something, or find yourself falling on your butt, check in with your stance as well as your forms. You might indeed benefit from more practice with your forms, but you also might need to improve or change your stance as well.

Yes, you are definitely WEIRD.

I can say with 99% certainty that if you are reading this blog then you are WEIRD. First, let’s simply acknowledge the fact that you must be pretty WEIRD when compared to most people if you are looking to take more ownership of your life, are curious about ways to do so, and have found this blog in your searches for helpful information on the topic. But I mean WEIRD in an even more fundamental way. WEIRD is the acronym coined by University of British Columbia researchers back in 2010 to describe the vast majority of “subjects” used in most humanities research done over the past 50+ years – college students from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic countries, aka, WEIRD.

It turns out that many Universities and Colleges offer course credits for participating in research studies being run through the various departments on their campuses. These same Universities and Colleges host the research programs, employ the professors who run them, and must pay all the costs for doing so – including paying the subjects who are recruited to participate. What better way to “pay” students than to simply give them some course credits that the they need to graduate? Seems like a win for everybody, right?

Well, maybe not. Perhaps using mostly teenagers from the upper half of the Social Economic Status of the richest countries on the planet as the baseline for “humanity” might be less than ideal. How much truth do you think can be generalized across cultures and through time based on this particular group of research subjects? I know with great certainty that I wouldn’t wish any generalizations to be made onto anybody from me and my life during those early college years!

As a friend of mine recently quipped, most of us in these WEIRD countries are living lives of “generalized captivity” compared to many other places on the planet today, and especially when compared to what we can gather about other cultures and places in the past. We sit most of the day in climate controlled environments, eat heavily processed food, get limited sunshine and outdoor exposure, and have relatively terrible levels of obesity, diabetes, and other diseases of torpidity. How do you think our recent ancestors lived in comparison? Or even our fellow global citizens living today in other places and cultures?

More recent studies since WEIRD became a thing have shown that our WEIRDness manifests in all kinds of interesting ways that differ from other people in the past and present. Compared with recent ancestors our bones are thinner and weaker now than theirs, our jaws our smaller and teeth much more misaligned, and our sedentary lifestyle has created about 1000 other differences. Compared to other people in non-WEIRD cultures today our vision is much more myopic, we focus on figure vs ground, and are better at picking out geometric shapes but fare worse in seeing larger patterns over time.

All this aside, I mention our collective WEIRDness here for a few reasons as relates to my work with clients who are seeking more authentic modes of being, living, working, and otherwise showing up in the world as more fully human. First, our larger culture is WEIRD, so any attempt to self-actualize by conforming to it seems problematic to me right from the start. Pragmatic reasoning suggests conforming to local ideals to be a good idea in many scenarios, such as driving on the right hand side of the highway with everybody else. However, from a perspective seeking greater self-unfoldment and personal development, maybe not.

Second, our WEIRDness is a sudden and steep aberration from our collective history as humans on this planet shaped by eons of evolutionary pressure and collective sensemaking. Therefore, other cultures on the planet, past and present, are perfectly reasonable places to consult for those seeking deeper connections to themselves and society at large. A good start to look for more meaning are the all the places that people have claimed to actually find it for centuries and centuries – family, friends, culture, religion, work, love, self-actualization, etc... You aren’t going to find it on Amazon or in the Metaverse, trust me on this one.

Finally, much of our WEIRDness seems to be great progress in many regards, and should be appreciated and valued as such. I’ve traveled extensively and am quite grateful to be among the WEIRD here in the US. However, that has almost no bearing on making research findings based WEIRD subjects the universal litmus tests for “normal,” “healthy,” or “aspirational” generalizations. Have you been in a room full of college underclassmen recently? Keep this in mind next time you read an article that starts with “New research in Psychology suggests...”

Back to you, you WEIRDo. You might have a sneaking suspicion that life is pretty weird here in the US in 2022, and that maybe the collective is off its collective rocker in many regards. I’d say to trust this intuition and expand your search for deeper truths across time and space and see what you might find there that resonates with you. I’m guessing that college dorms and online marketplaces aren’t the best places to find what you’re looking for.

“That’s not my experience!”

How many times have you heard that phrase when trying to explore an idea or advance a line of reasoning with a friend or colleague? Or even worse, perhaps you’ve recently used it yourself in an attempt to relativize or discredit somebody else’s perspective?

Here’s the thing. There are about a million areas where any one person’s experience, or even any 10 million people’s individual experiences aren’t really relevant as a touchstone or truth test. This is especially true these days in the rising Culture Wars where many people have limited capacity when it comes to separating out facts from feelings or distinguishing between generalities and specifics. “That’s not my experience” has emerged here as a favorite cop-out when people get uncomfortable with ideas and implications, and instead of being offered as an invitation for deeper learning this phrase is now commonly stated with an air of finality as a declaration that the conversation is over.

But guess what? Their personal experience is extremely limited. As is yours, and mine too. My “personal experience” in looking around my everyday life is that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. That the Earth is flat, and that the stars go away in the daytime and come back at night. These “mysteries” captured the attention of history’s greatest thinkers, such as Confucius and Aristotle, and many theories were put forth in attempts to make sense of it all. Were there great wheels in the heavens, turning everything about? Maybe a huge curtain, with lights shining through holes in it? Or perhaps even chariots of the gods pulling them all about?

Now, through the diligent work of more recent thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, and others, it’s common knowledge that our collective “personal experience” of the movement of the Sun, Earth, and Stars is not a good reflection of how things actually work. The heliocentric Solar System and its basic mechanics are now common knowledge for 1st graders. Let that settle in for a minute. A question that puzzled some of history’s greatest minds has been resolved, and the resulting model is now taught in children’s books. Wow. That’s pretty impressive progress, and only one example out of many I could have chosen.

This advancement in knowledge only became possible when “That’s not my experience” was not seen as an ending point for inquiry, but as a starting point. It might be worth it to peek behind the curtain of your own belief systems. Where have you been using your experience as a wall to be defended, and where might you better see it as a door to be opened?

Agent vs Arena

You are the Agent. Your environment is the Arena. Which do you think is easier to change? Which is the proper focus of your limited time, energy, and money? Where are you going to have the most success in your efforts and get the most bang for your buck?

This is one of my favorite discussions to have with new clients, especially those that are really committed to taking greater ownership of their path and trajectory. This conversation is extremely important for many reasons, not the least of which is that our larger culture puts almost all the of focus on the Arena, much to our collective detriment. A much better use of our personal resources is to focus on ourselves as a true Agent, and our inner terrain as where we should invest our efforts.

Think about for a minute. When was the last time you heard the phrase “personal responsibility” used in the context of being an important factor to consider? Where have you recently read the words “choices and consequences” fairly being used as a natural, neutral, and necessary part of all of our choice-making endeavors? What we find instead in many places across the larger cultural landscape is messaging that blames the Arena for our fortunes, or lack thereof. Very minimal attention is put on us as individuals and as responsible adults. As actual Agents of choice and action. Like “free agents” in sports, or the Agent characters in the Matrix movies, claiming your Agency gives you exponential access to freedom and power within your life and circumstances.

Our terrain as Agents is where we have so much more access, more influence, and more control over our experiences. Our inner terrain can be cultivated. It can be nourished. It can be developed and strengthened, allowing us to calmly and consistently apply effort in the direction that we want to go. Whether to the gym or the ice cream shop. Whether to go talk to the principle about little Johnny’s classmate calling him a name, or talk to Johnny about cultivating inner strength enough to not worry about it. Whether to complain about your co-worker’s success or simply put your head down and figure out how to perform better yourself.

Taking ownership of your terrain and ownership of your power of choice and action as an Agent to change it can be harder in the short term than simply blaming the Arena. But the Arena is always changing and evolving on its own. Are you planning on being the same Agent, or will you be changing and evolving too? In which directions, and for what reasons?

Information vs Action

How much more data do you need to see? What unknown is still pending? What additional pieces of the puzzle are necessary for you to move forward? How much information do you need before you act?

Or is there another factor in play, one that is probably playing a much bigger role in your “not yet” stance than you may realize? It’s worth checking in with yourself a little deeper here. In fact, I suggest that you demand that your hesitation speak up. Interrogate it a bit. Ask for proof, for evidence, for the receipts. My years in this work would lead me to believe that your hesitation is not entirely due to simply needing more information. You might in fact just be playing slow or playing small. So, what specifically does it need prior to committing to action?

I emphasize specifically in the sentence above because often times, when pressed, many people find it really hard to articulate concrete concerns. They instead start with a vague fear of “something bad” happening, or even say just the raw uncertainty itself is felt as a negative. So I suggest you dig a little deeper. Can you concretize the fear into an actual event? One that is tangible and measurable? Or do those attempts end up sounding a bit hollow, or even empty when coaxed out of the shadows? Even if you have a pretty clear worst case scenario, like losing all your money placed in a potential investment, what are the real odds of that worst case scenario actually happening? And even so, how would more information change that risk?

John Boyd, a great military strategist you can read more about here, created the idea of the OODA Loop where OODA is short for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. In any kind of conflict or environment where there are winners and losers, he postulates that the “winners” are almost always those who can “close” their OODA Loops the fastest and then begin a new one as the environment changes.

Why do I bring this up? Look again at that last step – Act. You can “decide” all you want, but it comes down to action in the end. At least when it comes to “winning” in a competitive environment. This idea of the OODA Looping is extremely relevant for many folks in today’s digital world where agility, flexibility, and real time responsiveness is at a premium. Holding “loops” open any longer than necessary can be quite costly, especially for those in leadership positions.

Now let’s flip things around. How much are you risking by not acting now? How much ground are you ceding as you hold off and “wait for more information”? Where are you unnecessarily sitting somewhere, either before or after “Decide,” but short of actual “Action”? Where are incurring on-going costs simply by not acting? Where can you start your process of iteration by turning a decision into concrete action?

This exercise is a good tool to add your processing toolbox, especially if you are leaning into a new role, starting a new job, or jumping up to the next level. And just like with Boyd’s OODA Loop modeling, the more quickly you work through this exercise the better you’ll be at either accurately identifying the specific information you need to get clear on before you act, or even better, realize that there isn’t something specific you need other than to overcome your own resistance. Either way, change comes from Action, so what are you really waiting for?

Bandwidth = Time x Energy2

I’ve talked about time and time management in a previous post,, explicitly how time is something we don’t just happen to have in our pocket or find lying around, but is something we actually own. A lot of power comes from viewing time as a personal resource under your control. Specifically when it comes to being intentional about both the costs of creating it and the importance of spending it wisely on things that rank towards the top of your personal and professional priority lists. 

However, today’s digital and meta world requires us to be intentional about more than just our time management skills. The much bigger variable in play is one invisible to most people, and that’s the amount of energy they have available. More specifically, being able to accurately gauge the amount of energy required to manage the ask that comes across your desk, especially when the ask is merely framed as a time or scheduling question. 

I suggest my clients use the concept of bandwidth to measure the real cost involved in the asks they receive because it explicitly measures energy across time. As an analogy, look at your home internet connection. 900MB/sec is a lot more information flowing than 150 MB/sec, and those numbers explicitly illustrate the rate of energy as information measured in Megabytes flowing per unit of time as measured in seconds. In your home a lot of bandwidth being used by one streaming device impacts what’s available for other things. The same holds true for your brain, especially when managing a complex mix of personal and professional responsibilities. 

I like to remind my clients of this framing with a play on Einstein’s famous E=MC2 equation where I set it up as Bandwidth = Time x Energy2, or B=TE2. This is how any work project, social event, or other ask should be evaluated rather than as just as a simple time or scheduling demand. And look at my equation carefully. The Energy component is squared here, just like the C in Einstein’s equation, as that is the much more important thing to be considered. Your bandwidth is what is really being tasked here, not just your time, and you only have so much available. 

Next time you are on the receiving end of an ask, either a social get together or a role in a new project at work, see if this reframe is a helpful tool for you. Look underneath the simple time or scheduling question. Think about the energy requirements that come into play for this request, and then square those before circling back to the time aspect. Are you willing to own the time requirements needed for this ask? More importantly, are you able to devote the required energy, especially the full amount necessary to show up as your best self? 

Now you are reframing the original ask in a way that helps you more clearly evaluate the costs, and from there more accurately gauge your interest in committing yourself to it. This useful reframe gives you the real question to consider – are you willing to allocate the necessary amount of bandwidth needed here? 

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

Some say “Iterate” is another fancy word for “practice,” but “iterate” has a very different wrinkle in the definition that makes it far more relevant in the business and professional world. While both words focus on repetition, improvement, and applied intention and effort, what moves “iterate” above “practice” for me and my work is that “iterate” enfolds more complexity, more dynamism, and more engagement with real time factors. 

Let’s first look at what it means to practice. Practicing involves repeating steps or motions many times in order to achieve a clear goal. Hitting your driver straight on the golf course requires a lot of dedicated practice. So does getting a strong backhand to reliably show up in your tennis game. In both of these instances the goal is clear, and perhaps more important, entirely stationary. Neither the fairway nor the baseline is going to move after you hit the ball. 

Secondly, in both of these instances the practice part is ideally happening isolated from the rest of your game. Your best way to practice hitting your driver straighter is to go the driving range and focus on that one shot. Similarly, practicing your backhand is a dedicated activity that is very different from playing a game and consists of repeated balls hit to that side for you to return. 

Finally, both of these examples illustrate how practice involves focusing entirely on your ability to close the gap between goal and outcome by refining and tweaking your actions in relative isolation from real world pressure. There’s no score on the driving range, and no one trying to beat you in a tennis practice session.

Things operate differently in the real world. There is real time involved, real money at stake, and real consequences to your actions. An errant drive late in the day on Sunday has cost many a PGA player millions of dollars, and same with professional tennis players finding the net with their backhand instead of the baseline. 

Beyond the above simple costs, the real world is much more complex than single skill development and is full of moving targets, some of whom shoot back. It’s much more dynamic than a quiet driving range with clear distance markers. And perhaps most relevant, the real world is shifting and moving. In many instances, it is actually responding and adapting to your ongoing efforts. You still control your own action of course, and are trying to close the gap between goals and outcomes. But the real world has agency, the market has other players, and not all of your colleagues are “friendlies” rooting for your success. Practice has limited use in this environment

“Iterate,” on the other hand, is what I find works best when it comes to improving our performance or products in the real world. Every effort at betterment comes from intentionally incorporating feedback we have received from the previous effort’s trials. Every “next version” has incorporated revisions or adaptations that address the previous version’s shortcomings. Every model is necessarily an effort to find a better fit in the complex and dynamic real world. 

As individuals seeking to make change in our lives, we can iterate by taking on the mindset of “perpetual prototyping.” This is more than just a mental stance. In fact, it’s much more about cultivating emotional resiliency in the face of struggle. It requires us to also implement a degree of discipline when encountering resistance, especially from our own internal inertia. This approach gives us added flexibility that comes with holding all things more lightly along with the calm assurance that comes from viewing failure as the next opportunity for improvement. 

Making significant and sustainable change is rarely easy, but it can reliably be accomplished with dedicated time and effort. But instead of “practice, practice, practice,” a much better approach to building out better habits, lifestyle choices, skillsets, and other personal and professional goals is to “iterate, iterate, iterate.” 

The Rules vs Shared Agreements

We all know about The Rules. From a certain perspective, they can be seen to largely define our lives. Speed limits, term limits, time limits – everywhere we look we can see how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by The Rules.

And as we’ve all heard a million times, The Rules are there for a reason. Some reasons are better than others, of course. I greatly prefer to drive on highways where everybody is operating their vehicles largely in unison when it comes to the “rules of the road”. I also really appreciate the folks with 13 items who patiently wait in the main lines while those with 12 or less quickly get through the Express Lane. 

Other rules can be terribly unhelpful, for all kinds of reasons. I’ve come across those same articles you have where silly and antiquated rules are still on the books in various municipalities across the land. Just recently I learned that in Arkansas The Rules say that the only legal pronunciation of the state’s name is where it ends in “saw.” They are very clearly not interested in sharing more than just the spelling of things with that lesser state of Kansas. Also against The Rules in Arkansas – keeping an alligator in a bathtub and honking your horn at a sandwich shop after 9pm. Actually, that alligator rule seems good to me, let’s keep that one.

Anyway, one thing that many of The Rules have in common is that they are imposed by external actors and then enforced upon us all through various means. And again, this is largely for the collective good. But what about in our relationships? With each other, with our coworkers, and perhaps most importantly, with ourselves? How helpful is bringing The Rules into these more tender and important places, and is there a better way of establishing some clarity and shared understandings in these places?

I’ve found the concept of Shared Agreements to be much more constructive here, especially when framed as mutually created and existing between independent, responsible agents. Which sounds better to your ears? “Hey, I have to head out, my wife wants me home by 6,” or “Hey, I have to head out, I told my wife I would be home by 6”? Or how about “I need to work late tonight, my boss wants this finished project on his desk first thing tomorrow morning” vs “I need to work late tonight, I agreed to have this project on my boss’ desk first thing tomorrow morning”? 

Notice how the first version in each example has the authority externalized, leaving no ownership left for the speaker? They are just following The Rules that they have been told. The second version moves the locus of power inside the speaker. They are honoring an agreement they have willfully entered. Which version seems more empowering to you?

Where in your life are you just following The Rules given to you, and more importantly, where can you change that dynamic to one where you are creating and honoring Shared Agreements?

Owning your Time

How frequently have you heard the following, or something very much like it? “Sorry, I didn’t have the time to finish that.” “I’d love to, but I don’t have time to take that on.” “I don’t have the time to put that on my plate right now.” Perhaps the better question is to ask yourself how often are you the one saying it?

We are all much busier than we used to be, especially with both work and social demands coming in faster and asking more of us from day to day and week to week. And it’s natural to want to agree to many of these requests, especially ones we imagine to be important, fun, and/or fulfilling. But do we have the time to do it? To say “yes” and feel good about it?

The saying that “we all have the same 24 hours in a day,” while a bit trite, is still fundamentally true. But “having time,” or even “finding time,” isn’t what’s really going on here. In fact, I’d suggest that time as in actual clock minutes is the least relevant factor. So given that we all start with the same amount each day, how come some people always seem to be short on it while others aren’t?

To begin, in my opinion, a more helpful take on it all is to view time as something we fundamentally create, not a commodity we just have lying around to be grabbed when needed. This shift in perspective helps illustrate where we have more power here than might first appear. Beyond just checking to see if you happen to have an open slot on your schedule is to remember that you have the ability to move things around to make an opening, an important consideration. So next time you are asked to do something, try to move the internal reflection from “Do I have time for this?” over to “Am I able to create time for this?” This first move of ownership is a powerful tool for better time management.

The second, and more powerful move, is a taking a deeper look at another factor – your actual priorities. Having a clear sense of your priority list, and actively checking in with it as opportunities (and demands) come across your dashboard, is one of the strongest moves you can make to more effectively manage your time and commitments. Time is much easier made for things that rank near the top of our list, and being clear about the relative ranking of things also makes it easier to pass on or let go of the low end offers. So let’s further shift our internal debate from “Am I able to create time for this?” over to “Am I willing to create time for this?”

So next time you get asked if you “have the time” for something, check in with yourself for a few moments before replying. Take ownership of your schedule and ability to make time. Then take a look at your priorities and see where this request fits in, or even it if fits in at all. Now the real question becomes clear – “Are you willing to create time for this?” Hopefully the answer that follows comes from a place of fully Owning Your Time and taking responsibility for how you spend it.

Cooperate vs Collaborate

I’ve never really liked the word “cooperate,” usually because I’ve heard it being enforced onto people who are having trouble finding a way to work together. From the elementary school playground behind my house all the way to the corporate boardroom, and everywhere in between. Think about it for a second. Where have you used the word, or had it used on you, in a situation where you were thriving? Where you and your team, coworkers, or colleagues were all humming along nicely in a symphony of success? 

More likely it’s been asked of you, or you’ve asked it of others, as a response to some degree of dysfunction. And it is usually delivered with a grim “or else...” attached to the end of it, either spoken or not. Given that framing, I rarely use that word at all anymore. Not even at home with my kids. It’s effective in certain cases of course, but the implied power differential between those asking and those hearing it, along with the inherent deprioritizing of each person’s individual goals, makes it less than helpful in most professional settings where the success of the project relies on productive teamwork and intentional coordination.

What’s a better term? One that is empowering, and comes across as an invitation? One that acknowledges the agency and importance of each person’s individual goals while also illustrating the need to focus on and achieve the larger team goals? One that connects to each person and draws out their strengths and capacities, and allows them to truly shine as individuals while also actively contributing to the bigger objective?

Collaborate is what I’ve landed on and made the core foundation of all my coaching and consulting work. How can we work together to accomplish the larger goals by drawing upon our individual skillsets, aptitudes, and experiences? How can we team up in the spirit of willful engagement with the challenges in front of us? How can we learn, apply, experiment, iterate,, and improvise as we explore this new territory, this higher potential that is unlocked through our combined efforts? How can I help you clarify your goals, chart a path forward, and implement the required action steps to get you there? Through collaboration.